The Things I’ll Ban when I Get Elected Mayor of New York City

Unless he changes the rules again, Mike Bloomberg will stop being mayor of New York City at the end of this year. Since everyone else in the city is running for mayor, I figure I might as well get in on the fun. My qualifications? I have never posted pictures of my erect penis on Twitter, and I did not make a billion dollars overcharging people for groceries, as two of my rival candidates can claim. But I have spent most of my adult life getting priced out of one up-and-coming New York neighborhood after another, and I have survived two blackouts, a minor earthquake, a major hurricane, a terrorist attack, and a Republican national convention.

When elected, I vow to ban seven things. No exceptions, no whining, no ACLU lawsuits. They are:

1. Book Store Closings
Every year the staff at my favorite bookstore, St. Mark’s Bookshop, has to pass the hat because the store can’t afford the grand-larceny rent. Other bookstores, from huge chain outfits like Borders to small independents, keep going out of business. Under my administration, no bookstore will be allowed to close. Stores suffering financial difficulties will be eligible for no-strings grants that enable them to stay in business, hire more staff, and stock more titles. How will I pay for the grants? By levying a modest 0.001% income surtax on the city’s billionaires (sorry, Mike, but you can afford it!) and aggressively collecting unpaid back taxes from Bank of America and other corporate cheats.

2. Tourists
More than 52 million out-of-towners invaded New York City last year, an all-time record. From what I overheard on the street, the majority of these invaders were from France, Germany, and Ohio. This must stop. Under my administration, non-New Yorkers will be granted visas to enter New York City for a maximum of 48 hours if — and only if — they can prove they are business travelers here to make money and therefore will be too busy to mosey around Times Square, the High Line, the Chelsea Market, SoHo, Century 21, and the Staten Island Ferry, taking pictures, hogging scarce space, moving too slowly (or not moving at all), and holding endless debates on whether they should eat dinner at Applebee’s now or take in The Lion King first and eat dinner at Applebee’s after the show.

Don’t worry about lost revenue. Giddy New Yorkers will stop barricading themselves in their apartments at night and will begin flooding the tourist-free streets, spending money like drunken sailors in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and on tickets to The Lion King.

3. Dogs
I realize this is a hot-button issue, but banning dogs from the city is actually a pro-dog, not an anti-dog, move. I love dogs! Put yourself in a dog’s paws. Would you want to be a part of the braying, the stench and the fawning — “Look at that adorable Corgi trying to hump that Great Dane!” — at one of the city’s dog runs on a hot August afternoon? No! Have you ever been lashed to a pay phone and spent a couple of hours yapping at the sky while your master hangs out in the corner deli talking about what’s wrong with the Mets? No! If you’re a dog, you understand that you don’t belong in an over-crowded city made mainly of concrete, motor vehicles, and pushy human beings; you belong in the great outdoors full of grass and trees, where there are no pooper-scooper laws and you can run, copulate, and defecate freely. I realize this is going to be a tough sell with the doggie crowd, but if you really love your dogs so much, you’ll free them from your cramped apartments and those stinky dog runs and you’ll set them loose in the vast open spaces of France, Germany, and Ohio.

4. Tattoos
Another toughie, especially for prison inmates, hipsters, and J.R. Smith of the Knicks, but this one has a huge upside. When I close down all the city’s tattoo parlors, not one single tattoo “artist” will lose a job — because they’ll get new jobs removing tattoos. I’ll establish a free city-wide network of laser tattoo-removal studios that will employ all of the former tattoo “artists” plus all the MFAs who need to supplement the income from their day jobs pretending to do important things on computers at the front desks of Chelsea art galleries. Mandatory tattoo-removal will be a money-maker with an aesthetic bonus: no more otherwise-attractive young women with antlers inked onto their lower backs. (Full disclosure: My brother owns the patent to the InkBeGone laser tattoo-removal technology, and he’ll probably make some money when the city awards its multi-million-dollar contracts for laser-removal parlors.)

5. Car Alarms
This one, I’ll admit, is a no-brainer. Everyone hates car alarms. Even insurance companies hate car alarms because car alarm owners pay lower insurance premiums than schmucks like me who drive cars that were made before the invention of the car alarm. This sad state of affairs inspired the insurance industry to commission an independent study that revealed the shocking news that car alarms do absolutely nothing to deter auto theft. The only people who don’t hate car alarms are the people who make, sell, and install car alarms.

So close your eyes the next time a blatting motorcyle, a shrieking ambulance, or a loud car radio moves down your block. Instead of the symphonic zoop!zoop!zoop! grrrt!grrt!grrrt! hoo-weeeee! hoo-weeeee! hoo-weeeee! REE-a-REE-a-REE-a-REE-a of a dozen car alarms going off at once, try to imagine…nothing…just a warm bath of silence. Some people believe it’s impossible to rid the city of car alarms because of the powerful car-alarm lobby. But, remember, people said the same thing about squeegee men, subway graffiti, peepshows, and affordable apartments. And all those things went poof!.

6. Mandatory Smoking Bans
The last straw was when Mike made it illegal for me to smoke my fat, noxious Dominican cigars in East River Park while enjoying the refreshing river stench and those terrific views of fuel storage tanks and shiny high-rise condos on the Brooklyn waterfront. So I’m going to turn back the clock and make smoking bans voluntary. Owners of all bars, restaurants, theaters, and office and apartment buildings will be free to choose if they want to allow smoking on their premises, or ban it. Then they’ll be required to put up a sign in front of the building that says either DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT SMOKING INSIDE or COME ON IN AND KILL YOURSELF, WE’RE ALL DOING IT. Smokers seeing the former sign will keep on walking; non-smokers seeing the latter sign will do likewise. Everybody’s happy. Nobody gets told what to do. Same goes for public parks, which will have designated smoking areas on the sites of all the de-commissioned, de-odorized dog runs. I promise you, our parks will actually smell better.

7. Bullets
As the great philosopher Chris Rock has noted, AR-15 semiautomatic rifles don’t kill people. Bullets kill people. So I’m banning all bullets, from BB’s right on up through dum-dums and hollow points. This niftily avoids an un-winnable confrontation with the all-powerful National Rifle Association, which has concluded that the best way to stop school shootings is to get more guns into schools, preferably in the hands of expert marskmen employed as janitors and teachers’ aides. Since there is no National Bullet Association, to my knowledge, I say let New Yorkers own as many guns as they like — but don’t let them have any bullets. My ban will apply to everyone, including the police, Second Amendment wackos, and the gang bangers who live in the projects across Avenue D from my apartment. This is democracy at its purest because all New Yorkers, regardless of race, religion, national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, income, or zip code, will finally have something in common: absolutely no one will get shot anymore.

In closing, I also promise to ban penis pictures on Twitter, street fairs, $25 museum tickets, overpriced groceries, Brooklyn, 3-D movies, ambulatory texting, February, artisanal cheese and pickles, Spike Lee, stretch limos, ice cream trucks, franchise restaurants, and The Lion King. But, as I learned from my predecessor’s misguided attempt to limit the size of soft drinks, it’s not smart to be overly ambitious. So I’ll save those bans for my second and third terms. Or maybe, after I change the law on term limits, my fourth and fifth terms.

Bill Morris
is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of the novels Motor City Burning, All Souls’ Day, and Motor City, and the nonfiction book American Berserk. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times, The (London) Independent, L.A. Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

Each man’s middle age crisis begins at an indeterminate age and offers a peculiar window into the architecture of masculine decline. In this respect it mimics death, which is both punctual and ruthlessly efficient in its demolitions. For many men, the crisis begins with the fear that your Emersonian Self-Reliance is spent, or even worse, you’ve sucked so deeply on the marrow of life that you are now as penniless as Henry David Thoreau.

In my case, the crisis has arrived at the age of 39 with the realization that I’m numerically closer to 48 than I am to 29. Now this isn’t to suggest my twenties were a time of wine and roses, but simply to make the point that 48 is old—crotchety old in my book, as in Mr. Roper the curmudgeonly landlord in Three’s Company or the portly short-order cook Mel Sharples from Alice (I’m painfully aware that younger readers may find these 1970s references both dated and horridly nostalgic). And the reason that 48 is old, of course, is that it is two steps from 50, which is not the new 20 or the new 30, but the old half-century mark, period.

I proudly note that my crisis has not involved acting out cultural stereotypes — there have been no impulsive trips to the Corvette dealership or expensive gym memberships — but centers instead on Wikipedia entries and male celebrities over the age of 40. It plays out like this: night after night I Google celebrities as they flash across my television screen, not only looking up their age, but trying to get a handle on what they’ve accomplished by 40 — and even more importantly — what great achievements are possible in the 5th, 6th, and even 7th decades of one’s life.

I quickly realized Wikipedia was indispensable for such queries, for its entries list a person’s date of birth up front, along with paragraphs on the celebrity’s early life, professional career, and personal life. Armed with accurate chronologically-based facts, I learned how little I’d accomplished by 39 in relation to say, Charlie Sheen, who though he is clearly in a class by himself when it comes to the middle age crisis, did have impressive films like Platoon and Wall Street on his resume years before tiger blood and Twitter.

Over time my Wikipedia research has uncovered the dark underbelly of my own crisis, which isn’t that I fear death to be imminent, but that I regret the years I squandered in my twenties and thirties loitering through time and space. As a result, my non-existent Wikipedia listing has nothing about the spellbinding novel I’ve written, the legendary appearances on the Charlie Rose Show, the critically-acclaimed performance in Sofia Coppola’s recent dreamy bio-epic on Morrissey or my special friendship with writer Christopher Hitchens.

Speaking of Charlie Rose, I know from Wikipedia that he was born in 1942, which if you do the math makes him 69. From my crisis point of 39, I can comfort myself by thinking, “Okay, after the age of 40, Charlie lived 29 more years where he did some of his best work.” I scan down to the “Career” section of his biography where I find the real gem in his entry: he didn’t begin the Charlie Rose Show until 1991 at the mature age of 49. This means I still have 10 more years to finish the novel and/or bump into Sofia Coppola on the streets of Paris.

Watching the news over the last two months I’ve become curious about former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK). It turns out that DSK is 62 years old, seven years younger than Charlie Rose, but arguably less attractive, although we’d need a woman between the age of 35 and 50 to confirm this. And although he’s shaped like a beet and not particularly handsome, it was a revelation to learn that he was an infamous ladies’ man in France. I began to wonder: will I still be attractive to women when I’m in my 60s? Being happily married I will never find out of course, but men — like their female counterparts — like to think they remain at least plausible to the opposite sex.

During a typical night of TV I come across CNN’s Piers Morgan, he’s probably about 50, but I’m not that interested in Mr. Morgan so I don’t Google him. I flip from channel 702 all the way up to 790 and then to the chagrin of my lovely wife — who is not in the least alarmed I will soon be 40 — I descend back to 702, pausing briefly on ESPN to marvel at men who are forever in their prime. This pause gives rise to guilt that I’m not reading volume two of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy by the fabulous Spanish novelist Javier Marias, who was born in Madrid in 1955 and is now 56. I learned too late that Marias is precisely the kind of person you do not want to look up on Wikipedia, because he published his first novel when he was 20, speaks English flawlessly, and because he’s European, does not have the kind of American habits that give rise to middle-aged bellies the size of the Iberian Peninsula.

The crisis goes on like this night and day. It matters little whether I’m on YouTube, watching television, flipping through my wife’s magazines or churning through RSS feeds and Twitter updates, there are always endless amounts of famous, middle-age men to look up. There is the former Connection radio host Christopher Lydon (70), my favorite literary critic Harold Bloom (80 — which means I could double my life, if I shared his longevity), former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer (51), British rocker Morrissey (52), and on and on it goes.

In addition to my Wikipedia obsession, it has also been impossible to ignore that something new, and very French, is happening to me: I’ve been reading and talking far too much about Paris lately, which is significant because I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a Francophile. A sudden interest in Adam Gopnik’s (55) book Paris To the Moon, a yearning to watch Juliette Binoche (47) movies on Netflix, and the serendipitous connections involving Frenchman DSK, Sofia Coppola (39) who lives in France, Charlie Rose who is a well-known Francophile, and Christopher Hitchens (62), who used to be a Marxist (Okay, I admit that one is a stretch).

Having read the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, I was immediately concerned that like the character April Wheeler, I was fantasizing about a magical life in Paris as a form of escapism. It worried me that it was possible to quit my job, sell the condo, move to Paris (I’ve seen it done on HGTV’s House Hunters International after all) and start working on a novel while my wife spent her days buying fresh-cut flowers and baguettes. But before I could become too anxious about what it all meant, a factoid from the book hit me. The characters Frank and April Wheeler weren’t going through a middle age crisis — they were no more than 30 in the book — but a metaphysical crisis, which I wrapped up way back when I was 35! No need to worry.

Relieved that the Wheelers’ crisis wasn’t my own, I started thinking that living in Paris for a few years might not be the mark of crisis at all, but an opportunity. That’s what Gopnik did, not to mention the novelist Paul Auster (64) who lived in Paris in the early 1970s. They did not move to France permanently, for that would be rather clichéd, and let’s face it, slightly pathetic. I’m talking about a few years, five tops.

I can picture it now: my wife and I are lounging at a café in the 6th district. I’m scribbling away in a notebook as my wife raves about how fresh the arugula is. All of a sudden, we look up and see the lithe figure of Sofia Coppola and her husband, Phoenix front man Thomas Mars (34), standing directly in front of our table. “Are you an American by any chance?” she says. “Why yes. I sure am,” I respond.

We invite them to sit down and Sofia explains how her next film is about an American in Paris. She describes the project as a “kind of Henry James meets Quentin Tarantino (48) type of thriller” — and I’m instantly intrigued. Within minutes Sofia presses a script into my hands and declares I’m perfect for the role. We decide to move the feast to Sofia’s penthouse where everyone kicks back, while I rework her script on the fly. I hand the manuscript back to Sofia with red slashes and scribbled words. She pauses to scan my edits and is dumbstruck at my narrative instincts and ear for dialogue.

“You’re a writer too?” Sofia says.

“Yeah, I’ve written a few things,” I say modestly.

“How is it that we’ve never heard of you before,” Sofia says. “With all this talent?”

I shrug my shoulders and wink at my wife.

“You must be one of those, how do you say in English, late bloomers?” Thomas asks.

Let me ask you a question, my friends. When was the last time an American won the Nobel Prize? Do you know the answer? It was 1993, and it was an African-American woman! Nothing against African-American women, okay? African-American women, some of them, they’re gorgeous. Perfect 10s. But still, you gotta wonder: 23 years ago, and it was a black lady. Before that, you have to go back to 1976 – and it was a Jewish guy! Now, I love the Jewish people, and we all know the African Americans love me, but seriously, it tells you something when you have to go back to 1962 to find a real American Nobel Prize winner in Literature.

Our literature is slipping, folks. We’re losing our edge. It’s sad. It’s just so damn sad. You know why we’re slipping? Because our colleges are run by politically correct guilty white liberals who hate America. Oh my God, America’s college professors are so dumb. I could have been a professor, okay? Believe me, I’m a terrific teacher. People love it when I explain stuff to them. It’s a gift I have. But why would want to be a professor? Sure, I could sleep with some cute coeds. But think about it: Do you see many college professors married to supermodels? Do you see college professors with personal brands worth $5 billion. No, you don’t. And you know why? Because they’re so dumb.

You know how you can tell they’re dumb? From the books they teach. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The Interpreter of Maladies. The House on Mango Street. Anybody here read The House on Mango Street? I haven’t, either. I’m a businessman worth $10 billion. I don’t read books unless I wrote them, and even then I’m selective. But they’re teaching The House on Mango Street like crazy in English Departments across America – or at least they were in the 1990s, which just goes to show you how current my information is. The author of that book is Sandra Cisneros, who is, I believe, a Mexican. She was born in the United States, okay, but her parents are Mexican. So she’s Mexican. It doesn’t matter where you’re born, not if you’re black or brown. President Obama was born in Hawaii and his mother was a white woman, and yet the man’s Kenyan. It’s so obvious, if you think about it.

Anyway, there she is, this Sandra Cisneros, on college reading lists along with Edwidge Danticat and Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz and all these other foreigners, and THEY’RE TAKING JOBS FROM AMERICAN AUTHORS. Good, hard-working American authors like Jonathan Franzen and John Irving and Richard Ford. Time magazine, which is, to be honest with you, this close to losing its press credentials with me, but anyway, Time called Jonathan Franzen “The Great American Novelist.” “The Great American Novelist,” my friends, and he can’t get onto a university syllabus to save his life. He’s too “commercial,” they say. He doesn’t play nice with Oprah. And, oh yeah, they never say it because they’re too politically correct, but he’s too white. That’s the real problem with Jonathan Franzen. He’s too white, too male, and too straight. Sorry, Jonathan. Three strikes and you’re out.

We’re going to take back the Western canon, folks. We are going to build a big beautiful wall around books written by white people and we’re going to make the immigrants and the African-American writers pay for it. Foreign writers are eating our lunch right now. We used to dominate the world of letters. The Russians, the Chinese, even the French – they all read our books. We used to be feared and loved around the world. And now look at us. Look who’s winning Nobel prizes these days. Svetlana Alexievich? Patrick Modiano? Mo Yan? I mean, what the hell kind of name is Mo Yan? Is that a guy? A girl? Which bathroom does Mo Yan use in North Carolina? Hah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Damn, I’m funny. I’ve gotta tweet that. But this is serious stuff, folks. These foreign writers are winning the Nobel Prize year after year, and we’re letting it happen. They’re shlonging us and we’re so stupid and lazy and politically correct that we like getting shlonged!

Well, no more.

When I’m President, I’ll ban all books by immigrant writers until we can figure out what the hell is going on with the Western Canon. I’ll ban translations by foreign authors, too. We’ll ban so many books it’ll make your head spin, folks. We’ll empty out the university book stores! We’ll clear whole shelves from the library! We’ll fire all the politically correct professors who hate America! We’ll build piles of books as high as one of my big, beautiful, classy hotels, and we’ll burn them all to ashes!

And when we’re done, my fellow Americans, we will make the Western Canon great again.

(Hat tip to frequent Millions commenter Moe Murph, who supplied the headline for this piece.)

Bill, listening to you talk about urban dogs is like listening to Mitt Romney talk about how it’s dangerous that you can’t roll down airplane windows. I know everybody’s entitled to have an opinion, but man, sometimes voicing it—even “comically,” since this piece has the appearance of aspring to humor—just reveals ignorance. And not innocent ignorance, but rather that Romneyesque arrogance of ignorance, in which you plow ahead in the belief that your own moral superiority is surely worth the same weight as the legions of experts and experienced people who have a far better understanding of the issue. The dogs will do just fine without your yapping on their behalf.

Lauren Groff’sFates & Furies, just out in paperback, tells the story of a marriage.

The first half of the novel is from the perspective of the husband, Lotto, who sees marriage as, “a never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full.” The second half is from the perspective of the wife, Mathilde, who says of marriage, “Kipling called it a very long conversation.”

Fates and Furies shows how two people can misunderstand each other over time. Lotto and Mathilde live their lives together, but they inhabit completely different worlds. In this way, the novel has a similar dynamic to Twitter. People tweet messages at each other while also inhabiting completely different worlds. Though on the social network major miscommunications take only 140 characters to unfold, in both a true connection remains elusive.

So what if Lotto and Mathilde were both to tweet? Without the luxury of 400 pages in the novel, Lotto would need to activate all his advantages given the limited space, whereas Mathilde would need to cut short her passive aggressive ways.

If you have read Fates and Furies, you might question whether a private person like Mathilde would ever expose personal details in a forum designed for public consumption. Under usual circumstances, she would not. But she’s always made an exception for Lotto and his wicked sense of timing. And he, in turn, has made a life of luring her in.

But would high-born Lotto join Twitter? I’ll remind you that he is an actor in a playwright’s hide. He’ll never not be vain.

We at The Millions appreciate good criticism for its own sake, whether it be about The Paris Review or soccer commentators, Orhan Pamuk or Beyonce Knowles. In that spirit, we present this dialogue–inspired in part by Slate’s TV Club–about one of this season’s most fascinating television shows, The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love. Edan Lepucki and Patrick Brown are not only regular contributors to The Millions, they are also married. They watch the show together, and they started this dialogue via email a few weeks ago. Neither can wait for tonight’s season finale.

Edan: We started watching The Bachelor on Hulu two episodes after it began (it took us a single night to catch up). Although you originally expressed displeasure at the thought of watching the season, you quickly became invested in Bachelor Jake and the throngs of ladies (most of them blonde–oh how my people embarrass themselves again and again!) who adore him. It’s strange, because, although the show is fairly boring, with its drawn-out rose ceremonies and its empty-platitude-strewn confessionals, as soon as an episode ends, I begin salivating for the next. I must be drawn to the show because it’s so inane and heinous. I suppose I enjoy being incensed by 23-year-old women who feel their lives are empty and meaningless because they haven’t found “Prince Charming.” Do you think there are people out there who watch this show without judgment? Is there an audience for whom The Bachelor is neither a farce nor a tragedy?

I know a married couple who watched the show religiously, and even place bets on who would be the last woman standing. Is The Bachelor a narrative for smug married people (ahem)? Or is it more for smug single people, who would rather remain unattached than degrade themselves on national television? What, do you think, is the appeal of this show?

Patrick: It’s true, I wasn’t too excited by the prospect of watching The Bachelor again after a couple years off. The last one I remember before “On the Wings of Love” was “An Officer and A Gentlemen.” The bachelor that year was a captain or a lieutenant or something in the Navy. He was the most boring person I’ve ever encountered, either in real life or through my television. All he did was work out. That was it. He was like The Situation on a battleship. I think he married a personal trainer, too, if I remember correctly. Anyway, that guy turned me away from the show for a while.

But surprisingly, I’m enjoying this season. Whether it’s the bachelor himself — Jake (Pilot Jake, as I call him) — or the women, this season is genuinely entertaining. To answer your question, there’s no doubt that there are plenty of people who enjoy the show “unironically” or however you want to put it. And I think, on some level, I enjoy it this way. I love the drama of it. I like to see people put it on the line. Whether you believe these people can really feel something in just a few weeks or not, I do think they feel a profound disappointment when they’re dumped. I’ve seen women crying so hard they were hyperventilating. That’s good TV.

I think the reason the show resonates with so many people is several fold. Mainly, I think people crave repetition, and The Bachelor is highly repetitive, which Adorno claims reassures us against death. This is why good pop songs have a tried and true structure (also, incidentally, why a song like “Pink Moon” is unsettling, because it turns itself upside down and doesn’t follow that typical structure). Everything about The Bachelor — the sensationally stagey rose ceremonies (My favorite part is when the guy stares at the pictures of the remaining girls, thinking longingly about which ones will make it to the next round), the way they all keep saying the same key phrases (“I felt a connection,” “I’m not sure she’s here for the right reasons,” etc.), the way even the characters know the sequence of the show (“Next week is hometowns, and I don’t take that lightly”) — it’s all there to reassure us that we’re still alive and everything is moving along as it should. I think this is especially powerful in that it deals with marriage, so not only is it “We won’t die,” but rather “We won’t die alone.” That’s powerful, whether you enjoy it ironically or sincerely or whatever.

I also think that people love to judge one another’s relationships. How many conversations have you had in your life that were about how wrong two people were for each other? A lot, right? Well, this is that on a national scale. Of course, whenever you’re judging a relationship, I think you’re always insinuating that one part of the couple is wrong or poorly matched to the other. There’s an implicit (or, sometimes direct) suggestion that one of the people is inferior. I think we see that with Vienna, who comes off as fake, desperate, cloying, etc. My question to you is why does she illicit those responses from us? Is she not successfully playing the role we’ve assigned her? What is it about Vienna (and others of her ilk who have come before) that makes everyone hate her? If Jake really thinks she’s the bee’s knees, who are we to judge?

Edan: Well said, Husband! Regarding this idea of repetition, one of the things that bothers me most about the show, and which I also depend on and anticipate each time a new episode begins, is the use of overly familiar and vague language. As you’ve pointed out, the contestants from season to season use the same key phrases (if another person refers to the process as “the journey” I’m going to throw up), and Jake repeatedly describes the women he likes in the same bland terms. For instance, in the last episode we watched, where he and three of the women go to St Lucia, he kept saying, in confessional, “She’s amazing”–and he was referring to a different woman each time! The women, too, aren’t able to tell us why they actually like Jake, other than to say stuff like, “He’s the kind of guy I’ve always dreamed of,” or, the most meaningless of phrases, “He’s perfect.” In many ways, the rhetoric of the confessionals is a fiction writing teacher’s nightmare: all telling, cliched language, absent of specificity and individualized, perspective-driven emotion. But I wonder, is that the comfort of the show? And is that the comfort of the marriage narrative? I wonder if the scenic action on the show–the scenes we see of Vienna and Jake making out on the deck of a pirate ship, for instance–is meant to suggest the spontaneity of a romantic relationship, while the voice-overs and direct addresses to the viewer, emphasize the comfort, the familiarity, of that same relationship. A fantasy of marriage, in other words, one perfectly counterbalanced by risk and safety.

It’s funny you should should bring up Vienna, the show’s villain. She’s been demonized on the tabloids and the other contestants disliked her. You say she’s fake, cloying, and so on–but, you know what? I love her! This has been my favorite season of “The Bachelor” because Jake, for all his washboard ab dullness, has made some surprising choices. Yes, he got rid of your favorite hot girl, Gia (Lord, is that crush getting tiresome), but he kept her for much longer than either of us expected. And Vienna continues to hang on, and online gossip says she is the ultimate winner. She’s not the prettiest, she’s got terrible extensions, and her relationship with her father (she’s a self-described “Daddy’s Girl” ) is questionable. Vienna subverts our expectations. The villain is not meant to win this kind of show! Nobody is supposed to want a villainous wife! What do you make of Jake’s choice to keep her on the show? And how do you compare her to sweet and wholesome Tenley, the woman of “values” with the I-was-molested-as-a-child porn star voice?

Patrick: Vienna’s father uttered one of the truly remarkable phrases in recent TV history, when he said (and I’m paraphrasing here): “You want a good wife? She’ll be a good wife. You come home, your house will be clean, your kids will be raised right.” It’s perfectly acceptable to want a marriage where only one spouse has to work (you could point out how unlikely this is on a pilot’s salary, but that might poke some unwanted holes in the narrative), but coming from her father, it seems wrong, somehow. Like that’s all she has to offer. Vienna seems to represent a certain kind of person in America. I think the fact that you (and some of the other women on the show) see her bad dye job and her unsubtle tan, and what they really see is a clue about class, right? She just seems lower class than some of the other girls (like Ali, who has a plum first-world job tending the cloud at Facebook). That seems significant to me, since the show is pretty much an aspirational narrative. We forget that the origins of The Bachelor aren’t that far from the sordid Fox shows like Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? A previous bachelor was heir to the Firestone tire fortune, and a major part of his narrative was that he had a ton of money and would make some lucky girl into a real life princess. Another Bachelor was titled nobility somewhere (they filmed that season in a castle, in case the fairy tale element wasn’t obvious enough). I think that’s what America sees in Vienna. They have dyed hair and spray tans. Many of them want the sort of rigidly defined gender roles that Vienna’s dad described. And if Vienna can win, it means they can be the princess (in a standard middle-class fantasy life in suburban Dallas).

Speaking of Ali, when we were watching the episode in which she had to choose between keeping her job and staying on the show, you remarked that it was the typical “Man or career: you can’t have both,” dilemma that women have been confronted with for years. In a way, this season’s final four encapsulates the show’s reactionary sexual politics quite nicely. Of the final four, Ali had to choose between her job and her love life, Gia was too sexy, maybe, to get a husband, leaving the slightly lower-class woman who the man could dominate economically, and Tenley, the juvenile one, who he could dominate psychologically and physically. Or maybe I’m just a cynic. Tenley seems like a bland religious type (there’s one in every season, though, like the villain, they don’t often make it to the finals). Jake’s connection with her is all about “values,” which I think means that they don’t think gay people should get married (though that’s never explicitly addressed). She’s juvenile, in a creepy sort of way. My question to you is why does The Bachelor — a show with a largely female audience — continue to enforce these sexist stereotypes of what a women can (and in some cases, should) be? Why can’t sexy Gia be a wife (or villainous Vienna)? Why does Ali have to choose between her man and her career? And if we can agree that the show does reinforce some retrograde ideas about gender, why do so many women enjoy it? Is it a self-loathing thing?

Edan: You write, “And if Vienna can win, it means they can be the princess (in a standard middle-class fantasy life).” You may have a point, but how do you read the public’s vilification of her, then? Most people (not me!) don’t want her to win. They don’t believe she’s worthy of Jake, worthy of the life he would provide for her. So if she doesn’t deserve to be the princess, do they? Does her vilification mean we don’t believe the classes are as porous as we’ve been taught? Or perhaps this season of The Bachelor proves that love (or at least sexual attraction) conquers all, and that Jake–Mr. Values, Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Stable, Mr. Right–will choose the former Hooters waitress over the classy Christian woman simply because he likes her better. This seems to return the show to its purported roots: a narrative of two people finding one another and discovering an undeniable connection despite a series of obstacles. So why the outrage?

Fans of Ali protest that picking Vienna wouldn’t be a wise choice, but that brings me back to the question of marriage, and what it means in our cultural imagination. How is choosing Vienna unwise? Cannot one’s wife be a bratty 23-year-old? Perhaps that’s what Jake wants in the end: a fun girl to take care of. Maybe “dominate economically” is the official term, I don’t know. When Jake asked Vienna how she imagined marriage, she said she expected it to be like they were kids, just so in love, doing what they pleased, kissing all the time. This definition of marriage must be devalued in the eyes of the viewers. I agree that her vision is a little narrow, but, then again, it’s not a totally inaccurate depiction of marriage, or ours, at least. But is there only one definition of marriage? I marvel at how many woman on the show have mentioned “the fairy tale” narrative–as if that were the only one, and as if, as if!, this were a plausible reality. Never do these women point out that the fairy tale ends with the wedding.

It’s funny that you think Jake kicked Gia to the curb because she’s too sexy. That’s definitely your biased interpretation; I’m not so sure Gia is as sexy as you keep exclaiming. I actually think she was kicked off because she’s from New York City, and still lives there. Jake was intimidated, perhaps turned off by, her cosmopolitan lifestyle. In the narrative in Jake’s mind, one can date a New Yorker, can revel in the Carrie Bradshaw fantasy of it, but that woman isn’t wife material. On the show, his explicit reason for dumping her was that she “didn’t open up” as much as he needed her to. Every season, we see this conflict; the game requires the women profess their love, but strategically: not too early, and not too late. Perhaps this is one of the appeals of the show: it mirrors the dating life, if that mirror were in a fun house. Maybe the fantasy of The Bachelor isn’t that woman will revert to these outdated gender roles that you speak of, but that there are single men out there who want to get married and have children. They’re ready for the commitment, and, on top of that, they require a woman to speak her heart. Usually, it’s women who are asking this of men, not the other way around. Perhaps, here, this reversal of roles, is what gets the female viewership off. Maybe they’re turned on by the anti-Old School story that The Bachelor perpetuates.

Patrick: You’re probably correct that I’m inventing the “Gia’s too sexy” narrative, in part because the women on the show aren’t sexualized (at least not in the context of hypersexualized contemporary American culture). On this show, it’s the man who is sexualized. It’s Jake who soaps his abs for the camera. Even the scenes where the women are in bikinis are pretty tame. It’s clearly a show for women, and I’m not supposed to be thinking about who is the sexiest, only who is the best mate, the most fitting for Jake. It’s another reason Jake is a bit of a rogue, as far as Bachelors go — he’s probably going to choose Vienna, and a part of the equation has to be her sexuality. As for the New York angle, there’s certainly some validity to that, though Jake was pretty comfortable with Ali, who lived in San Francisco. I think it was also that Gia was ethnically a New Yorker — she had an accent, etc. — while Ali was suitably blond and “All American.”

In the end, I think the show succeeds because it holds different appeal for different people. For those in a committed relationship, they can mock the people proclaiming to have fallen in love after just a few hours together. Those who are still looking for a partner can feel a bit of envy, and more than a touch of escapism. My issues with the show remain its cliched portrayal of love as the result of some sort of checklist. Does your partner: look good, enjoy the outdoors, drive a truck, proclaim to want kids, have a Golden Retriever and believe in traditional marriage? Then it must be love! Maybe this season has been so enjoyable because it has, to some small degree, subverted this idea. Nobody can put their finger on why Jake likes Vienna precisely because she doesn’t conform to that checklist. (Does your partner have a bad dye job, a strange ex-marriage and a 401K from her days as a Hooters waitress? Then you’re in love!) This version of the show, early on at least, had a bit of spontaneity to it, something earlier seasons have lacked.

Of course, if Jake picks Tenley tonight, then everything I just said is moot. He’ll have chosen the same kind of goodie-goodie they always pick. Most people, I think, would be happy with that, but I think I’m coming around to your opinion, that choosing Vienna is the more interesting way to go. I wouldn’t want to be married to her, but who can say what’s in Pilot Jake’s heart?

Edan: Amen to that. Can’t wait to see what happens tonight. When I was a kid, my vision of marriage was eating dinner in front of the television with a handsome and witty man who’d read The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Dreams do come true.